The Exception and the Rule

THE EXCEPTION AND THE RULE: Karen Mirza and Brad Butler

Brad Butler in attendance

UK artists Karen Mirza and Brad Butler’s artistic practice challenges and interrogates participation, collaboration, the social turn, and the traditional roles of the artist as producer and the audience as recipient. This investigation currently manifests in The Museum of Non Participation, a cross-cultural artistic intervention and appraisal of standard forms of representing and experiencing the everyday in Karachi and London. The project was conceived in 2007 when Mirza and Butler witnessed the Pakistani Lawyers movement protests and subsequent state violence from a window in The National Art Gallery in Islamabad.

The Exception and the Rule is Mirza and Butler’s most recent film from this ongoing series. Conscious of their outside perceptions of the city and its geo-political weight, they investigate the everyday patterns of Karachi’s inhabitants and social architecture. In a city with almost no museums, the city itself becomes the museum. Non-participation becomes a form of resistance that critiques agency and consequence of participation/implication, action/inaction, and resistance/pacifism within the constraints of our global economic and political systems.

Their earlier work, Non Places, The Space Between, and The Autonomous Object? provide history and context to Mirza and Butler’s commitment to questioning the objectivity of the cinematic frame and its implications in anthropology, ethnography, and architecture.

THE EXCEPTION AND THE RULE: Karen Mirza + Brad Butler
Brad Butler in attendance
23 November 2009, 7:30pm
Pacific Cinematheque [1131 Howe]

Tickets $9.50/$8 Cineworks members or students + $3 membership

A co-presentation between DIM Cinema, VIVO Media Arts and Cineworks Independent Filmmakers Society.

www.mirza-butler.net

www.no-w-here.org